What's up with AMD Radeon Drivers? . . .

[britechguy]

This post isn't to answer that question, but to information share. My recent topic about my own machine having sudden BSODs noted that these, at least at times, seemed to be directly related to AMD Radeon Drivers. And, of course, that machine is one that I have upgraded to Windows 11 on unsupported hardware, so there are a number of "unknown factors" that were possibly involved.

Now, however, on its "hardware twin" that is still running Windows 10, fully updated, and AMD Radeon Software & Drivers fully updated (for mainstream version) the following appeared:


I did report the issue, but this strikes me as spookily similar to the situation around the BSODs on the other machine. Both of these machines have been in use in my household since late 2017, and without incident in this specific regard, or most regards.

There have been no recent BIOS/UEFI updates and the Radeon Drivers on the machines have been the same for quite a few months now. I wonder if MS has introduced something in a recent Windows Update that's making this stuff "burp" and/or "barf"?

 

[phaZed]

It could be the driver, but it could also be the hardware. That driver timeout could be because the driver crashed - but IMO, more likely is that the card stopped communicating, giving you the timeout.

That being said, it can be memory, MB, or otherwise "some other" cause for the disconnect, as well.

Which card do you have?

 

[britechguy]

It's integrated R7 graphics. There is no separate card. A12-9600P APU.

There's just not enough "other misbehavior" the would be characteristic of either RAM or motherboard issues, on either machine, for me to factor either in.

 

[phaZed]

In that case, I'd be looking at that CPU :-(

 

[britechguy]

I guess time will tell. But it's an "interesting coincidence" that may not be a coincidence.

 

[YeOldeStonecat]

I remember way back in the early ATI days the drivers were often buggy (I far preferred nVidia back then).
But somewhere along the line of the middle WinXP years ATI made a promise to greatly increase their driver development, I think they did a release per month. And got darned stable.

Current laptop (still Win10)...I'm running this version...laptop is steady as a rock. May upgrade to 11 soon.

 

[britechguy]

This is what's on both the laptops I've been referring to:

 

[Philippe]

laptop is steady as a rock. May upgrade to 11 soon.

Something looks wrong with this sentence (joking)

 

[Blues]

It might be the specific series of graphics driver as my PCs at home 1 is a Ryzen 5 3600 w/ RX580 and the other is using an AMD Athlon 3000 chip with IGPU neither is having any problems and both are caught up and kept up to date on drivers.

 

[The_Homer_Simpson]

Never seen this before but I have an HP laptop with AMD graphics and it would constantly claim to have updates available and every single time would fail as was running the latest version already! So frustrating.

 

[Blues]

Never seen this before but I have an HP laptop with AMD graphics and it would constantly claim to have updates available and every single time would fail as was running the latest version already! So frustrating.

I have seen that when Windows updates the driver to the one they store but it usually was buggy compared to the driver provided by the AMD software. Typically that only happened if you did a manual update and selected all updates included optional and/or driver updates. I had to manually remove and delete all drivers related to video and AMD to reinstall them from AMDs site to resolve the issue.